


Made Perfect Sense

by Runespoor



Category: DCU - Comicverse, Firefly
Genre: Gen, characters in urgent need of a hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-24
Updated: 2012-01-24
Packaged: 2017-10-30 01:45:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/326395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Runespoor/pseuds/Runespoor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Space-time anomalies as lead to a team-up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Made Perfect Sense

**Author's Note:**

> Title from a Mal quote in 1.03, “Safe”.

When she moves, she reminds him of Cassandra. 

He heard the man sneaking up on him, and he judged he'd have the time to finish fiddling with the radios before taking the other down. He was the only enemy (criminal? agent? spy?) left; they were well trained, but not up to the standards of Ra's' League of Assassins.

He still has his back turned when there's the sound of a body crumpling to the ground, muted, without even so much as a cut-off gasp. It's skill so deeply practiced as to become instinct that he lunges into a roll, covering ground to distance himself, and get back to his feet, facing whoever - whatever; the place is tech-filled enough that he knows to expect robots - took the other down.

A slip of a girl is standing there, pale-faced and with dark hair - longer than Cass. He blinks, and tenses his muscles in anticipation of the fight. 

She can't be older than Tim. It's not, as he well knows, any kind of testament to her skill-levels; when Bruce was younger than Tim is now, he was already one of the most dangerous fighters on Earth. Without even going into the likes of Cass or Damian.

Or she could be meta. In which case, of course, all bets are off. Bruce feels his lips set into a thin line. All considered, that is still preferable to magic.

But she doesn't attack him, simply looks at him, solemn and unafraid. Something deep in Bruce's chest shifts. 

"I can pilot a shuttle," she announces.

"So can I," he retorts. 

Unbidden, his shoulders are relaxing. 

These negotiations, he's familiar with. They usually take place in Gotham and not in the middle of time-travelling anomalies, but they've been a reliable part of his life, unfair and unpleasant as they generally are, for well over a decade now and he has some experience how they can go.

They finish with him giving in, but he's not actually opposed to that, here. He doesn't have much of an idea of what's happening here. Everywhere.

"But you don't know where to go," the girl points out. 

Batman looks sharply at her eyes, but finds no sign of deception. 

Meta, then. Or she has the same body-language reading abilities as Cass - close enough to precognition as to kick the ass of actual precogs, but only based on--

"You do?" Batman asks, and his voice is like ground coffee.

She nods. "I have friends. They're looking for me now; Simon is driving them crazy." She pauses, looks at him thoughtfully. "Not literally," she adds.

"I'll go with you," he says.

Acquiring a shuttle goes smoothly. 

She's fast, agile, quick-thinking; she knows how to use the nooks and shadows to make herself disappear, how to walk across the walls to avoid a video feed, and she doesn't hesitate or falter. 

"What's your name?" he asks once they've stolen the shuttle. 

She's riding the emptiness like a licensed pilot; he toys with the idea that she's older than she looks, cell-regeneration technologies at work, or maybe an Amazon, but quickly discards it.

"River," she says. 

Batman wonders if that's a code-name of some sort and he's been stranded in the middle of a galactic war using teenage agents as their premiere weapons. 

He asks about her friends; her answers sound quirky and disjointed to him, and maybe some of the things she calls out are some technical jargon of the future. But he doesn't think so. 

He watches her hands flutter above the piloting gear as she cuts herself off while in the middle of a sentence about Simon - he's her brother, Bruce understood - switches to Mandarin that's more changed grammatically than the English she's so far addressed him with.

"I'll take over from here," he says, gesturing to the piloting board. 

She squints at him.

"Take the other seat and keep talking," he orders. 

It's meant to reassure her. Maybe what she'll say next with help him build a better picture of what to expect from her friends, but that would only be an unexpected bonus. Hopefully, by letting her speak and with small interactions, he can help ground her. 

She leaves him her seat, and huddles into the other. 

Keeping his questions strictly away from anything that seems to depart from the mundane – nursery rhymes hold an eerie aura to anyone who’s fought crime in Gotham – he watches that River stays within herself. Her love for her brother is obvious, and so is her friendship for the mechanic Kaylee. She speaks of the captain as a wounded man and a friend. 

The only question is whether her abilities, and the neural damage that seems to have accompanied them, are natural or engineered. And if the latter, if the people who did this to her are still active.

Slowly, the flow of her words grows into a lull. She’s nestled into the seat, her eyes half-closed as she dozes off. Around them, everything is wide, and black, and quiet.

“I see them too,” River whispers. 

When he looks at her, she adds, “the things. Why you are who you are.” Her eyes are bright like with a fever. “There’s no gunshot in mine. And I don’t have—” she raises a frail hand; “ _this_.” 

She’s pointing at the symbol. 

“I won’t get eaten,” she mumbles reassuringly.

His chest feels compressed as she falls asleep, like the bat on his chest is tearing apart. In the recesses of his mind, he can hear the whisper of the thing that drives him, that force that talks to him in the middle of empty nights. 

At times he talks back.

He looks at her and is almost afraid that he will see the dark shape hover behind her seat. But it doesn’t, and River sleeps as fitfully as Robin ever did, undaunted by dreams of hungry, vengeful gods.

When she spoke of _Serenity_ , she smiled.

Batman watches her out of the corner of his eye and cannot find a fault, whatever else goes wrong, in bringing a lost child home.


End file.
